With English wines now winning awards over and above some of their more established competitors and many international wine companies buying up acres of southern England now’s a very good time to find out what you might have been missing. 

If you feel a bit in the dark about what English wines have to offer English Wine Week from Saturday 26th May to Sunday 3rd June provides the perfect opportunity to find out more.  With events taking place throughout the country at vineyards, restaurants and local fairs there’s sure to be something in your area that will give you the opportunity to taste a drop or two or learn more about this emerging industry.

Having had a successful Wine Relief tasting night last Saturday, Virtual Wine are now running a Cross-Blog-Auction in conjunction with Hugh MacLeod and Tim Atkin.

Cartoonist and blogger Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com and Stormhoek.com has drawn a special Wine Relief cartoon, and wine expert and journalist Tim Atkin has specially selected 12 bottles of wine from his cellar in aid of Wine Relief.

 Visit Virtual Wine to place your bid and do your bit for this year’s Comic Relief drive.

Well I must say things have changed a lot since I attended university as we discovered last night when we attended Winy Nite with the grad students at the London School of Economics, where the special guest was the one and only Gary Vay-ner-chuk. Our thanks go to Edgar, Ben, Emily and all that take part in this regular event in their halls of residence for welcoming us in and providing some amazing food and wines.

Here’s a list of what we tasted and ate:

As this was following the day of workshops for Future of Web Apps London, also in attendance were Miss Rogue aka Tara Hunt and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency, who had hooked up with Gary and Erik from Wine Library TV at the conference. What I loved is the fact that Tara’s pres at the event had been all about building community online and how to relate to your members, and here was Gary appearing as a special guest at a student wine tasting night in London [a long way from his wine business in New Jersey] because they watch and love his video blog and invited him to come visit with them next time he was in London - a fantastic example of online community going offline.

Gary sharing his wisdom with Edgar, the organiser of Winy Nite, and other members:

Erik and Gary from Wine Library TV and Mark and Emma [me] of Bottletalk with Edgar the Winy Nite organiser:

We’ll definitely be seeing these folks again, and looking forward to seeing the Winy Nite guys on Bottletalk.

Cheers!

Emma

Having dug a bit deeper I’ve found further information on Wine Relief including a full PDF list of all the wines that are included.  As a reminder, until 16 March some of the UK’s biggest wine retailers will donate 10% from the sale of these wines to the Comic Relief fund.

Also, Virtual Wine is running an online tasting event on 3 March featuring some of the Wine Relief wines.  You can find out more information here, so we looking forward to seeing you there.

Cheers,

Emma